Boy? Girl? Which would you pick? How would you decide?
If you’ve watched the news lately you’ve probably heard of how some people are electing to pick their child’s gender through in vitro fertilization, a process where the egg and sperm are fertilized outside of the womb. Of course this process is teeming with ethical and evolutionary issues all over the world. In fact, most countries have banned this ‘social sex selection,’ including Britain, China, Canada and Australia, among others. Unsurprisingly, this selection method is legal in the US, home of the liberal-minded and ethically diverse.
So what exactly does this mean? It means that over 70 percent of the people opting for this procedure come to the US from foreign countries and pay a ridiculous amount of money – just to choose a gender that they already have a 50 percent chance of conceiving!
I personally find the solution to this moral dilemma relatively simple – just DON’T pick your child’s gender! Let’s just leave girl sperms and boy sperms to battle till the death (quite literally) in order to win prime egg fertilization rights. It’s either that or years from now finding ourselves amongst an unbalanced gender feud where girls trump boys or boys trump girls (I vote the former).
Evolutionary speaking, if this procedure becomes more commonplace it could seriously hurt the future populations of several countries. People from China and India – who tend to opt for males– could face a huge decrease in their female population- and therefore reduce later generations. In places like Canada, where girls are the ‘chosen sex,’ population could also diminish– and say hello to an increase in bigamy!
Sure some countries like China have laws that regulate the number of children they have. Perhaps others really, really want two boys and two girls – ‘a matching set’ as I’ve so often heard it called. It’s still no excuse. Next they’ll want blond kids with blue eyes and Hitler to rule the world.
Summing up the positive points, or should I say point – this procedure is effective in avoiding sex-linked diseases. So if all your male babies are destined to have muscular dystrophy and die at an early age, this method allows you to select only females without the disease, which is an understandable use.
To me, the cons outweigh the pros by far. So here’s hoping for a world with a bigger ethical capacity than that of a teaspoon. If we start with gender, then hair and eye color, then what next?
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